


never be who i used to be

by lesbianboat (orphan_account)



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, The Academy Is...
Genre: Angst, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Possibly Unrequited Love, may contain factual errors that i didn't want to go to livejournal to check, no happy end but no sad end either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 13:30:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9326864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/lesbianboat
Summary: Someday he'll be content with just being fine enough. It's a slow, decade-long process, but William's getting there.





	

It's almost two years before William sees Gabe again. When he does --- it's brief, considerably less awkward than he imagined (not that he'd ever reveal that he'd everimagined it at all), full of  _how's she doing_ and  _what you've been up to?_ and _good to see you again, man_ and a little nagging feeling that things were being left unsaid _._ The low, subliminal ache that was ever-present in him for the better half of the last decade reappears every-so-slightly, so slightly that he barely notices it until reflecting upon the encounter hours later. But when he does realize, it doesn't affect him  _that_ much, and slowly, he starts remembering every dropped kiss and every single 'last' hook-up over the years. 

 

Realistically, he should have expected it.

 

Unrealistically, he can't bring himself to feel bad about it at all. Back when they were something, anything at all, he had told  _her_ , and she really didn't do much at that time, not that she could have. Of course, that didn't mean she'd be fine with it, nor would William himself be, for that matter. 

 

But now still, once in a blue moon, or when he's stuck in an emotional loop, or when a certain song comes on the radio, or maybe when he drives into the city and passes a familiar place --- his mouth dries up, his hands clench, and his mind wanders. 

 

If it happens often enough that he has almost a universe in his mind in which they're still together, he wouldn't ever admit it. 

 

But he totally does. 

 

It's fine, he tells himself, because in  _this_ world the love of his life is Christine Bandy and he is hers, and he's got a beautiful and radiant daughter whom he sends to school every morning and kisses on the forehead every night before she goes to sleep, and every night he crawls into bed on the left side and Christine on the right, and most days he feels perfectly happy. But William and Gabe in  _that_ world never fucked up, never said some choice words, were never too scared, never pulled on clothes quietly and slipped out of the other's hotel room at three am and then sung side by side that evening, grasping shoulders and waists and pretending that nothing's wrong just to say fewer than ten words to each other afterwards and then re-do the ordeal again. Instead, every night William concedes the left side to Gabe and sleeps on the right instead, and they both sleep the longest they can in a house with both their names on the lease. 

 

So real-life William and in-his-own-mind William are completely different.

 

In that world, they're happy.

 

In this one, he is too. He is, he swears. But sometimes he's not too sure he can keep the status quo anymore.

 

But it's not like he wishes that he could suddenly switch to  _that_ world, because, he tells himself, he wouldn't trade Genevieve and Christine for the whole world. But Gabe's always been more than that, and everything starts to get a little fuzzy, even though he knows that being preoccupied with further idealising a pipe dream is absolutely ridiculous, but he can't stop. 

 

Months later, the entirety of the reunion feels like a trip gone wrong. It starts out with Riot Fest, and he knows that the crowds aren't for them, but when he grazes his eyes over them he lets himself pretend. Every time he glances to his left, though, he expects to see a flash of purple, watching them, like it's 2008 and Warped Tour, or 2007 and the Honda Civic Tour, or maybe even 2004 and the Midtown and Fall Out Boy and Gym Class Heroes tour again, and they're both young and people kept screaming for them, together and apart, and everything, even if it was half the country away or five years apart, seemed possible.

 

It doesn't help that Sisky and Mike and The Butcher are just  _right there,_ after he hadn't seen them for  _years._ It's a rush he hasn't felt for ages. But then, a few months later, tour actually starts again, and they're all learning how to exist with each other in a confined space without getting on everyone else's nerves and the rush fades a little. It's worse, now, since all their old friends are scattered or lost or have taken up something else entirely, and when the only time they mention _Pete Wentz_ and  _Fall Out Boy_ is either during emotionally weak times of reminiscing or for belated name-dropping and  _Decaydance_ is just an extra thing on the back of a CD.

 

The only thing keeping him going through it, beside their two days in Chicago, is the number of days until they reach Anaheim, for a reason that he's not really sure of. Is he dreading it? Is he anxious in anticipation? He doesn't even know for sure if Gabe is going to come, since all Mike told him was "Yeah, we should get some more on our rider for Chain Reaction," verbatim, and he had inferred the rest. During a quick pit stop in the Mideast for both gas and alcohol (of which he is accidentally the main consumer) he decides that he's tired of being strong and resisting and texts Gabe outright. He regrets it when he subsequently spends thirty pathetic minutes rocking back and forth on his feet before getting a "Wrong Number" message back. Of-fucking-course. 

 

He could always ask Mike, who always seems to be concocting weirder and weirder things up with Gabe, but he knows that Mike might just look at him weird likes he sees always sees right through him and honestly he doesn't want this to snowball into something bigger.

 

Slowly, he re-remembers why they split. 

 

And also, they do, eventually, reach Anaheim, because time passes on at the same pace regardless (or maybe because) of his ambiguous wishes. 

 

So when he and Gabe get back together on stage for the first time in more than 7 years, William keeps grabbing him and bumping shoulders and hugs him for longer than probably platonically acceptable. It's okay, because that's just what the Fueled By Ramen boys did, even though no one  _ever_ came out and all ended up settling down with their wives and kids in some suburb of some big city that somehow made the world feel not-so-big anymore. He doesn't know when that started but he does know that he's to blame. 

 

And eventually, they play their last show, four years late and crowds dwindling, And Gabe, Gabe's now one of the only people who've seen it all, from around the beginning to the end and how William keeps singing, repeating the last chorus of After The Last Midtown Show, which will always be about him and he will always mean it. Roughly, sort-of. He manages to distance himself most days, but not  _today_ , not when it's exactly thirty seconds before the After The Last The Academy Is... Showjokes start rolling in, when this wild hurricane of a journey he started when he was barely out of high school and naive and felt at peace no matter how far he was from home, and accidentally fell in love with someone, _something,_ that he was foolish enough to think would work but everyone else knew wouldn't, is ending, and  _especially_ when he looks over his shoulder and sees, standing side-stage, not a flash of purple but rather a figure standing tall, arms folded, in a big gray sweatshirt and biting his lip, looking torn over an emotion that William could only  _hope_ was anything close to what he's been feeling from the past week, or his imaginings from the past years, or his ache from the past decade.

 

He decides that it's not desire, it's not nostalgia, it's the firing of neurons in a pattern that hasn't been used in years but still functions perfectly well. And he knows, everyone knows, why he can't stay in this fever dream. 

 

And he begins to forget again.

**Author's Note:**

> title is a lyric from unforgettable by NVDES, whose guitarist (fun fact) was the lead singer in a band in which the guitarist was the academy is...'s old bassist)


End file.
